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Event Description
JOYCE NOTES is a six-part suite, composed by the legendary Irish jazz guitarist Louis Stewart, based on scenes from James Joyce’s groundbreaking novel Ulysses. The suite was written and first performed at the 1982 Cork Jazz Festival to commemorate the 100th anniversary of James Joyce’s birth.It was performed just twice more, once in Dun Laoghaire and Oslo, Norway in 1993.
Thankfully an RTE recording of the original Cork performance was made, and shared with the founder of Livia Records, Gerald Davis, who was also an avid Joyce enthusiast and jazz fan.
Though Gerald died in 2005, and Louis in 2016, the recording was found in the Livia Records archives, and a permission letter to use it, when the label was being resurrected in 2022 by its current owner, Dermot Rogers.
While some original charts were also found, the suite had to be transcribed from the 1982 recording to enable a new performance.
Conor Guilfoyle is one of Ireland's leading jazz drummers, educators, and authors. Growing up in a musical family in Dublin, he began drumming at age 13, playing on the local jazz scene as a teenager, before formalizing his studies at New York’s Drummers Collective and the Banff College of Fine Arts in Canada.
As a performer, Guilfoyle has toured and recorded throughout Europe with leading international jazz artists including John Abercrombie, David Liebman, and Joe Lovano. A pioneer of Latin music in Ireland, he led Havana ’Che, producing the country’s first commercial salsa recordings. He now leads the Conor Guilfoyle Octet, an ensemble dedicated to 1950s Cool Jazz.
Offstage, Guilfoyle has been a central figure in Irish jazz education. He co-founded the jazz programme at Newpark Music Centre, which later became Ireland’s first Bachelor of Arts in Jazz Performance, now offered through Dublin City University.
Internationally recognised for his expertise in Afro-Cuban rhythms, drum technique, and odd meters, he has lectured at major institutions including Berklee College of Music and The New School in New York. He has also published instructional books, including Odd Meter Clave for Drum Set, Rhythmic Reading for Drummers, and Keeping the Drummer Occupied.
He is the founder and curator of the Irish Jazz History and Archive Project.
Barry McGovern was born in Eccles Street, educated by Catholic priests in a boys' boarding school and has lived in Sandymount, Sandycove and Chapelizod. He went to UCD where he graduated with a pass B.A. He played Stephen Dedalus in Hugh Leonard's Stephen D. (an adaptation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Stephen Hero) at the Abbey Theatre; Buck Mulligan in Blooms of Dublin, Anthony Burgess's radio musical version of Ulysses; and Jimmy (a.k.a. James Joyce) in The Saints Go Cycling In (Hugh Leonard's adaptation of Flann O'Brien's The Dalkey Archive) at the Gate. He has read, in public, all of Ulysses twice: over twenty Bloomsdays at the Martello Tower in Sandycove, and in one week in June 2022 at the Peacock Theatre. He has recorded The Dead, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (with his son Sam) and Finnegans Wake (with Marcella Riordan). And he has read Joyce's poetry at Árus an Uachtaráin. Recent work includes Stumped at Bewley's Café Theatre, the TV series Crá and the feature film Fidil Ghorm. He has also done some Beckett.
Livia Records mastered and released the original 1982 JOYCE NOTES recording in March this year and has commissioned its first live performance in over thirty years with the support of the James Joyce Centre. CD copies of the recording are available at the concert and from Livia Records. The label was reactivated in 2023, releasing Louis Stewart remastered re-issues and previously unreleased albums, plus new releases from contemporary Irish jazz artists.
The James Joyce Cultural Centre, Dublin is dedicated to being a dynamic, year-round cultural organisation passionately committed to supporting artists and creative practitioners who engage with the life, literature, and legacy of writer James Joyce. Few writers have loved music as deeply and instinctively as Joyce himself. A gifted singer of considerable ability, music flows through every line of his writing from the lyrical language in Dubliners, the inventive and playful interior monologues of Ulysses, to the extraordinary rhythmic complexity of Finnegans Wake. Joyce understood, as all great jazz musicians do, that the most profound art lives in the tension between structure and freedom, between the written note and the inspired departure from it. At the heart of the James Joyce Cultural Centre's mission is a belief that Joyce's work remains a living, breathing source of inspiration that continues to energise artists across every discipline and every generation. This very special performance of Louis Stewart’s ‘Joyce Notes’ is a celebration of that spirit — of music, of language, of Dublin, and of the gloriously restless creative imagination that James Joyce gave to the world.
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Venue Information - Royal Irish Academy of Music
The Royal Irish Academy of Music is a home of musical excellence and dynamism, a place of teaching and learning which consistently achieves its objective of transmitting and maintaining the highest standards of performance and appreciation in all musical disciplines. Founded in 1848 the Academy is Ireland’s oldest and most dynamic musical institution.
